SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

Not just me and you, but our planet..gone. Our solar system and galaxy, The Milky Way...gone.

Then, the universe itself keeps on expanding at an ever-increasing rate while the components of which it's made break down into more and more basic components. Interactions and reactions happen less and less frequently, and then hardly at all and then never.

I agree Otter fear of the unknown was my main driving force for not consciously being atheist for a long long time. In fact i remember calling myself an extremely agnostic person for decades.

I still have issues with the thought of never ever experiencing my family after death again. I pine not being able to comfort myself with false hope of the "afterlife".

The thought of nothingness after death was a big obstacle.

I finally came to my senses and let go of religion when I was continuously critically/scientifically hypothesizing about what happens to us after death. I kept saying to myself "ok self the best way to find out where i go after life is probably to figure out where I came from before life"?

Well the answer to this question was always "you came from nothing dumbass"

Now I might get behind a higher level of consciousness but not an all knowing god...

kind of like single cell life, multi-cell functionally separated cell function for the greater whole and then the next step above this with a larger multi person, multi organism consciousness.

For those that were in to Isaac Asimov Foundation trilogy the planet Gaia....."evolved their ability to form an ongoing group consciousness, but also extended this consciousness to the fauna and flora of the planet itself"

But again this is not god any more than man is god to an amoeba ......

Scientist are entertaining at least a godless higher reality by stating both that our 3D universe is both a hologram and a simulation and they have evidence of both. To state however that it is contrived by a higher power can be postulated but unfalsifiable at this time.

At some point, all elements will decay to the most stable state as the lifetime of proton (>1025 years) is not infinite.

As the atoms break apart in sub-atomic particles, the universe collapses and returns to a similar state as pre-big bang; almost nothing detectable in every direction. As long as gravity is imposes force, the remaining matter/energy can coalesce, compress, more compression, more compression, until a perfect balance between gravity and external forces is found. Then any single change in the structure could break it apart and permit expansion.

My personal idea. I am not tied to it as the exact mechanism of how universes start is not important to realize we are here now and shouldn't kill each other.

Of course the universe exists: we are in it, of it, it's up in our faces everyday, there's too much universe all over the place, if you ask me. But, that's why they call it 'universe', I suppose.

I guess we don't know if the universe will ever be gone. There's always going to be fire and brimstone and brights lights and dark spaces floating around, forever, I imagine. The good news is that "our" sun is scheduled to peter out in several billion years or something, so that's not a pressing issue at the moment. Nukes and Nature forcing the issue are immediate concerns, though, so I hope somebody somewhere figures those out. Maybe Jesus will help, they keep saying he will soon...

But I think there is confusion in the trem 'universe'. There is for me, anyway. I thought the universe meant everything everywhere and there wasn't anything else and therefore how can it "expand": -expand to what? It is everything--supposedly. But then they come out and tell us there are many universes--plural-- even though no one knows how the hell they can see any of the 'others' since they can't even see to the end of this one.